Level Up Your Side Hustle: Go Online

The new ways to earn extra moolah: from drop-shipping and virtual teaching to affiliate marketing. Learn from those who've been there, done that.

- Hayley Tai

1 SELL TO THE WORLD, EVEN WITH A TIGHT BUDGET

If you want to start a small online business but lack the funds, dropshipping is a relatively low-risk and fuss-free way to start a side hustle.

Basically, there’s no need to fork out any money upfront to invest in an inventory of items. Instead, you can trawl websites like Alibaba.com and Amazon.com (through its Fulfillment by Amazon programme) for drop-shipping manufacturers, and choose what you want to sell from their catalogues.

All you have to do is to set up a website with an e-commerce store and promote the things that you’re selling online. When a sale is made on your website, you simply act as a middleman to transfer the customer’s orders and shipment details to the manufacturer, who will ship the items directly to the customer. You earn a cut out of each sale.

Cherie Lim, a 22-year-old business and marketing undergraduate, dabbled in dropshipping for four years.

“I found the cheapest ways to set up my website,” she recalls. “I experimented with Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce, and I’m still exploring other platforms.”

She worked fast as a one-woman show, capitalising on the free two-week trial on e-commerce platforms to launch the site to save costs, and test if the products were saleable. If they were, she would continue subscribing to the e-commerce service. Cherie spent about $100 a month on social media ads to promote the products that she was selling.

With its low entry barriers, she says that drop-shipping is one of the best ways for students or those with low capital to start a business.